The best-selling author of "How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry selects and introduces the work of a still-underappreciated 20th century genius.

    This collection radically rewrites and contemporizes many of the myths central to Ovid’s epic, The Metamorphoses, Rekdal’s characters changed not by divine intervention but by both ordinary and extraordinary human events. In Nightingale, a mother undergoes cancer treatments at the same time her daughter transitions into a son; a woman comes to painful terms with her new sexual life after becoming quadriplegic; a photographer wonders whether her art is to blame for her son’s sudden illness; and a widow falls in love with her dead husband’s dog. At the same time, however, the book includes more intimate lyrics that explore personal transformation, culminating in a series of connected poems that trace the continuing effects of sexual violence and rape on survivors. Nightingale updates many of Ovid’s subjects while remaining true to the Roman epic’s tropes of violence, dismemberment, silence, and fragmentation. Is change a physical or a spiritual act? Is transformation punishment or reward, reversible or permanent? Does metamorphosis literalize our essential traits, or change us into something utterly new? Nightingale investigates these themes, while considering the roles that pain, violence, art, and voicelessness all play in the changeable selves we present to the world.

    A grove of majestic live-oaks surrounded it.Thirty years later, only the thick walls were standing, with the dull red brick showing here and there through a matted growth of clinging vines. The huge round pillars were intact so to some extent was the stone flagging of hall and portico. There had been no home so stately along the whole stretch of Cote Joyeuse. Every one knew that, as they knew it had cost Philippe Valmet sixty thousand dollars to build, away back in 1840. No one was in danger of forgetting that fact, so long as his daughter Pelagie survived. She was a queenly, white-haired woman of fifty. "Ma'ame Pelagie," they called her, though she was unmarried, as was her sister Pauline, a child in Ma'ame Pelagie's eyes a child of thirty-five.

    But deeper under the surface are his observations on war, environmental degradation, language, and history, as a father—troubled by violence and human mismanagement of the world—offers advice to a newborn son.

    It is less well known that the sisters also composed a considerable amount of fine poetry. This volume contains forty-seven poems by all three sisters. Selections include Charlotte's "Presentiment," "Passion," two poems on the deaths of her sisters, and six more. There are twenty-three poems by Emily (considered the best poet of the three), including "Faith and Despondency" and "No Coward Soul Is Mine." The works of all three sisters share the qualities of intelligence, awareness, and heartfelt emotion, expressed in simple, highly readable verse. Gathered in this handy, inexpensive collection, the poems represent a superb introduction to a lesser-known aspect of the Brontës' literary art.